NEED interviewed Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus for the upcoming Issue 5. As a professor of economics, Yunus concerned himself with the problem of poverty. He realized that to better their lives, the impoverished needed to earn sufficient income, but lacked access to loans that could enable them to start businesses. Yunus began a highly successful project of making small loans to poor entrepreneurs. This project, which became the Grameen Bank in 1983, has expanded opportunities for 7.4 million borrowers, and inspired the microcredit movement that is helping to alleviate poverty worldwide. An excerpt of the interview follows. This weekend, you can read NEED’s interview with another Peace Prize Laureate, President Jimmy Carter.

Stephanie Kinnunen interviews Muhammad Yunus. Photo | Thomas Lee

Q: How does lifting people out of poverty in Bangladesh impact people in the West?

A: Today, the words “global village” is used all the time, but no one really understands the impact of it. It is totally a village, so there is no India, there is no Bangladesh, and there is no other world. It is one world; it is the same village. One part of the village is falling behind and one other part is improved, so if something happens in one part, it immediately impacts the other. We are in the same market place. If the quality of life in one part of the village improves, the people want to buy more shirts, more shoes. So the people that are selling shoes will be selling more shoes, because these people are buying more shoes, so it impacts globally.

Today there is a shortage of food grains in the world, and there appears to be no explanation because the food production is not hampered anywhere, and the human population growth has not increased. Why the food shortage? The only explanation is the quality of life of the poor people is improving so they are eating more.

If part of the world remains poor it impacts business in the rich part of the village because they cannot sell things like appliances, clothing or designs. If the 1.5 billion people that are quoted as needing on one dollar a day in order to live, improves to two dollars a day, everybody would be able to buy one more pair of shoes, an extra shirt or one more piece of clothing. They will buy one extra thing at Christmas or any festival. That is how the growth of income improves the quality of life. It is a very integrated system that in the past may have been slow because communication was so difficult. Today communication is instantaneous, and transportation is faster than you can think, so you order things in one part of the world and they arrive at your home in a few days. I will say it is very important that we see that global context. With globalization you cannot think about separate worlds, it is a world that works together, lives together.

Grameen Bank
Mirpur-1, Dhaka-1216
Bangladesh

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